![]() ![]() His symphonic suite "The Planets" (completed in 1916, first full performance in 1920) is regarded as his masterpiece. His daughter Imogen Holst was a noted conductor, composer, and musicologist.Ĭomposer. Critics considered much of his music cold and cerebral, and even his closest friend, composer Ralph Vaughan Williams, had reservations about his later works. ![]() He shunned the spotlight and did not enjoy the few years of celebrity the great success of "The Planets" brought him. Sickly, bookish, and retiring, Holst was a firm believer in astrology and his interest in Far Eastern religion and culture was so great he learned to read Sanskrit. From 1905 until his death he was Music Director of the St. He studied trombone at the Royal College of Music and first eked out a living playing in brass bands. ![]() Gustavus Theodore von Holst was born in Cheltenham, England, of German and Latvian descent. Holst's other important compositions include "The Hymn of Jesus" (1917), the operas "Savitri" (1908), "The Perfect Fool" (1922), and "The Wandering Scholar" (1930), the "Choral Symphony" (1925), and the overture "Egdon Heath" (1927). Its best-known movements are "Mars, the Bringer of War," and "Jupiter, the Bringer of Jollity." The central melody of the latter was adapted into a popular English hymn, which was performed at the funeral of Princess Diana in 1997. A powerful, mystical work, it reflected the composer's fascination with the mythic and astrological aspects of the seven known planets beyond Earth (Pluto had not yet been discovered - or demoted). The International Gustav Mahler Institute was established in 1955 to honour the composer's life and achievements.Composer. Dmitri Shostakovich and Benjamin Britten are among later 20th-century composers who admired and were influenced by Mahler. Some of Mahler's immediate musical successors included the composers of the Second Viennese School, notably Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg and Anton Webern. These works were frequently controversial when first performed, and several were slow to receive critical and popular approval exceptions included his Second Symphony, and the triumphant premiere of his Eighth Symphony in 1910. Aside from early works such as a movement from a piano quartet composed when he was a student in Vienna, Mahler's works are generally designed for large orchestral forces, symphonic choruses and operatic soloists. Mahler's œuvre is relatively limited for much of his life composing was necessarily a part-time activity while he earned his living as a conductor. Late in his life he was briefly director of New York's Metropolitan Opera and the New York Philharmonic. Nevertheless, his innovative productions and insistence on the highest performance standards ensured his reputation as one of the greatest of opera conductors, particularly as an interpreter of the stage works of Wagner, Mozart, and Tchaikovsky. During his ten years in Vienna, Mahler-who had converted to Catholicism to secure the post-experienced regular opposition and hostility from the anti-Semitic press. After graduating from the Vienna Conservatory in 1878, he held a succession of conducting posts of rising importance in the opera houses of Europe, culminating in his appointment in 1897 as director of the Vienna Court Opera (Hofoper). Gustav Mahler, photographed in 1907 by Moritz Nähr at the end of his period as director of the Vienna Hofoperīorn in Bohemia (then part of the Austrian Empire) to Jewish parents of humble origins, the German-speaking Mahler displayed his musical gifts at an early age. Austro-Bohemian composer and conductor (1860–1911)
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